A research, which has been published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, has revealed that adopted children are more likely to be using drugs if any of their two biological parents were having a history of drug abuse.

Researchers from the Virginia Commonwealth University and Lund University in Sweden conducted a nationwide research in which they looked 18,115 children born and adopted in Sweden from 1950 to 1993. In addition, researchers also assessed more than 78,000 biological family members and 51,000 adoptive family members.

Lead author Dr. Kenneth Kendler, who is Director of the VCU Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, was of the view that the adopted children were twice likely to use drugs if their biological parents were into this habit.

Not only this, Kendler said that there are many other factors which can force children to take drugs. Some of them are environmental factors, abusive parents, and divorced parents. After analyzing all the enrolled children, it was revealed that 4.5% of adopted children had drug-abuse problems.

However, only 2.9% children of general parents were into drugs, said Kendler. "Risk for DA in adopted children is increased by disruption in the adoptive parent-adopted child bond by death or divorce but also by a range of indices of a disturbed adoptive home environment and deviant peer influences such as such as parental alcoholism”, he further affirmed.

Kendler said that they have tried to find out the reasons why children get into drug addiction. They found out that adopted children are extra sensitive to the pathogenic effects of ill family environment.

As per medical terminology, drug abuse is a complex syndrome, which occurs due to different factors, which include genetic and environmental risk factors.